The reason I reference his argument - apart from the fact that it’s a good one - is because recently I also read an essay by Ada Palmer that. I’m not going to recap Devereaux’s points in that essay you can go read them for yourself (the part about fascism is under the header “Echoes of Eco”). What’s new to me is the extent to which the Cult of the Badass maps to the values of fascism. And it isn’t hard to miss flaws like the toxicity of that concept, or the sexism baked pretty much into its core.
#TOWER OF TRAMPLE SWAN PART 3 TV#
I know some of you have started to read A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, either via my rec or elsewhere, so you’ll have already seen Devereaux’s sequence of posts about the idea of the “universal warrior.” (If not, then tl dr - he thinks the notion is absolute bollocks.)īut I want to particularly highlight the last post in the series, about the “Cult of the Badass.” I’d picked up this general vibe before, of course: the idealization and idolization of a certain kind of tough masculinity that we see all the time in books and movies, in TV and video games, and in real life (at least aspirationally). It would be an interesting trick to flip it around, highlighting the fact that by far the most common occupation across a given society was “domestic manager,” and most of ’em were women. I know there are reasons other than direct patriarchy why such books aren’t organized that way - because men’s lives have historically been more varied, the descriptions of their activities requires more words if you aren’t just going to blow them off with a few sentences, which would make for a hell of a long chapter on the male experience - but I’ve read a lot of works in this informal genre, and after a while you really start to notice how thoroughly that experience is centered, and then women’s lives are a sidebar. I’m starting to wonder what it would be like to read a book on daily life in X place and time that starts out by telling you most people, even among the upper classes, spent their days running their households, engaging in textile production, raising children, or (if they were wealthy enough) overseeing servants who did that work for them, and then has a section describing how men’s lives differed from that norm.
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